Build-a-Bowl Menu Trends | God's World News

Build-a-Bowl Menu Trends

12/19/2017
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    Nicolas Castan, one of the owners of the El Flako cereal café in Barcelona, Spain, makes up a bowl of the sweet stuff. (AP)
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    Just one of the combos of American and foreign cereals to satisfy sweet-toothed, nostalgic cereal café customers (AP)
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    Cereal café’s like El Flako have been popping up around Europe, catering to young professionals with money, nostalgia, and sweet tooths. (AP)
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    Granola nuts, dried coconut, and banana slices over a fruit smoothie base—a rare healthy option at El Flako. (AP)
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    Customers hang out at Pop Cereal Café in Lisbon, Portugal. (AP)
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The latest food fad has some surprise ingredients. It’s not quinoa or avocado or a gluten-free superfood, specifically. How does this strike you: Lucky Charms and Cheerios? Cafés serving breakfast cereal have exploded in popularity. Customers in Europe pay between $3 and $9 per bowl—more than a whole box in a U.S. grocery store. In some places, cereal sells.

Cereal cafés in the United States have mostly come and gone. Sure, one upscale sneaker store in Brooklyn still offers hungry shoppers a chance to eat Cap’n Crunch from a designer shoebox. But shops in Chicago, Florida, and Texas have closed. A flashy Kellogg’s store in Times Square lasted only a year.

Europe is another story. In the last two years, cereal cafés are snap-crackle-popping up in London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, Berlin, Hamburg, Manchester, and many other cities. Cereal is also trending in the Middle East. Straight cereal with milk is still the standard order. Most cafés offer at least 100 brands. But toppings go way beyond sliced banana on Corn Flakes. There are dozens of fruit and candy toppings, syrups, and several kinds of milk. Many also serve cereal-flavored milkshakes or creative twists on Rice Krispies treats.

At Pop Cereal Café in Lisbon, brightly colored boxes line the shelves. Diners doze on bunk beds and padded benches before or after eating the café’s most popular offering: Froot Loops and Rice Krispies with mini marshmallows and dried strawberries . . . topped with strawberry syrup, a waffle cookie, and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. (Can you say “tummy ache” in Portuguese?)

Nicolas Castan helped start El Flako in Barcelona. He says lack of cereal savvy led to some iffy combos when the café opened last spring. “Almost half the people would make their own, but they wouldn’t finish it because they were making really weird mixes, like Froot Loops with chocolate Krave,” he reports.

Maria Roca returned to El Flako for a second time with a friend, Nuria Amor. Roca munched a mixture of Cookie Krisp, Choco Krispies, Kinder chocolates, M&Ms, bananas, and chocolate milk. “It’s something original, so I wanted to show her.”

Would they be back? “For sure,” says Amor, chomping Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Apple Jacks with honey, apples, and wheat milk. “It was really good, and you wouldn’t do that at home.”

Definitely not . . . unless maybe you were at grandma’s.